ELIF BATUMAN

Photo credit: Riccardo Cavallari

Elif Batuman was born in New York and has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. Her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, made it to the extended New York Times paperback bestseller list for two weeks. Elif is a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and the Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor. She holds a doctoral degree in comparative literature from Stanford University and is working on a novel.